<h2>Description</h2>
<ul>
<li>More than one business has built something they have no business building</li>
</ul>
<h2>Disproof</h2>
<ul>
<li>A very clear arrow from your product to the way you want to change your market</li>
</ul>
<h2>Consequences</h2>
<ul>
<li>The great thing with problems is they create viable business in isolation</li>
<li>The problem with problems is that you typically need to resource a company around the ongoing delivery of a solution to them.
<ul>
<li>If you end up building/operationalising for something outside your core business, you’ll end up trying to build two businesses</li>
<li>This leaves you stuck with an undersupported second product line that suffers because you can’t leverage economies of scale or customer segments</li>
<li>Or you end up competing with and cannibalising your primary (hopefully successful) business</li>
<li>You screw this up, loose good people or overspend and have to fire people</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Multiple entire multi-million product lines have been shit-canned before launch (microsoft courier, google ara)</li>
</ul>
<h2>Causes</h2>
<ul>
<li>If you don’t have a clearly articulated mission, people tend to forget it</li>
<li>Someone, usually underacquainted with the problem domain, tries to ‘diversify’ or ‘expand margins’</li>
<li>But also happens if the product team is so lost in the weeds that it forgets to look up</li>
</ul>
<h2>Approaches</h2>
<ul>
<li>Build a culture that knows why we’re here, that repeats it often enough to remember and rarely enough so it doesn’t become trite</li>
</ul>


Forgot the mission

Description

Disproof

Consequences

Causes

Approaches